The Nerd Reich

Science fiction has long been the literature of nerds. The dudes in lab coats, the chess prodigies, the guys tinkering with computers. At a time when socially awkward science-obsessives were scorned by society, science fiction was sometimes a refuge … and became a haven for nerd-empowerment fables.

As such, the genre often portrays societies where eggheads and dweebs are central in the fate of society. Intellectual elites or highly skilled individuals dominate, reflecting a vision where scientific knowledge and technical prowess are the ultimate sources of power. It is not lost on us that these “nerds” are mostly depicted as male and white.

In his recent book Speculative Whiteness, Jordan S. Carroll tackles the problematic consequences of this legacy. The book traces a history of the ways in which the genre was and continues to be co-opted by the alt-right.

It’s an excellent work, and probably the most important book about science fiction written this year.

The term “speculative whiteness,” Carroll explains, is the racist notion that future orientation (i.e., the ability to imagine the long-term of the species) is an attribute unique to a specific pale-skinned subset of the species. He writes: “By laying bare [the] irresolvable inconsistencies in speculative whiteness, this book hopes to wrest speculative fiction from those who would limit it to the service of oppression.”

Over the course of a brief 100 pages, Carroll makes a strong case for not only the willful misreading of science fictional texts by far-right figures such as Richard Spencer and Giorgia Meloni but also how science fictional tropes and figures within fandom have occasionally been complicit in creating a field that is open to such interpretations.

Despite being an academic work, Speculative Whiteness is generally approachable. Carroll’s writing is occasionally urbane and witty; displaying the absurdity of racist worldviews through the irrationality of their assumptions. Carroll’s research is broad, touching on everything from Norman Spinrad’s satire of fascistic themes in the heroic fantasy The Iron Dream to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s most problematic book Lucifer’s Hammer.

Jordan S. Carroll won awards
for his previous book.
An excellent interview with
him can be found
at SFF Ruminations.
(Image via the author's BSKY)

Carroll is clearly familiar with both the literary history of science fiction, and its cultural history, as he cites discussions from conventions and fanzines. Although some revered figures in fandom are not depicted in flattering light, Carroll does not ignore the leftist and anti-fascist traditions within the community and notes the work of people like Judith Merrill, Ursula K. Le Guin and P. Djèlí Clark.

The book might have been stronger if it included more about deconstructing some of the negative subtexts in some mainstream modern science fiction. One can find current examples of nerd supremacist fables among best-sellers and works by highly paid mainstream authors. Even authors with relatively strong progressive bona fides have published tomes in which one can find troubling subtext that would fit neatly in the pages of Speculative Whiteness. In particular, we would note stories that emphasize the superiority of technological competence over more traditional sources of authority such as corporate power structures or government bureaucracy. Moreover, the subtext in these works reflect a positivist approach to human society, and sometimes reveals a level of contempt for social sciences and humanities.

We read a warning from Speculative Whiteness — in short, that nerd supremacist fables can always be co-opted by other forms of supremacism.

As a future-oriented genre, science fiction will always appeal to people who have political ideas about what the future should look like. As readers — and as critics — we should be conscious of the subtexts inherent within the imagined futures we celebrate. Speculative Whiteness is an important contribution to this discourse.

The Age of Empire (Hugo Cinema 1981)

Star Wars was inescapable in fandom.
At the 1981 Worldcon, Paul Cullen
dressed up as Luke Skywalker.
(Image via Fanac.org)

This blog post is the twenty fourth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.

The sequel to Star Wars was a cultural juggernaut within fandom, anticipated with such intensity that whole issues of fanzines were dedicated to parsing out casting rumours and speculating about the plot. Most contemporaneous fan reviews hold up well today: “This movie moves so fast, is filled with so many delights for an SF fan, and is so well done that to tell about it is a disservice. See it!” wrote Richard E. Geiss in Science Fiction Review.

But as difficult as it is to believe today, many of the arbiters of ‘higher’ aka ‘mainstream’ culture were dismissive of the sequel. “The Star Wars series, now in unpromising infancy, basically asks us to imagine and believe nothing – its technological sophistication does away with the need for the former, and its camp melding of myths in storyline and characters acknowledges the impossibility of the latter,” Sight & Sound Magazine bemoaned in a scathing unsigned review. Ralph Novak was more succinct, writing for People Magazine “it’s not up to the original.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby opined that the movie was bland, and filled with hot air.

The Hugo best dramatic presentation win for Empire Strikes Back is another instance in which the prescience of science fiction fandom is revealed over time. Unfortunately, the rest of the shortlist in 1981 was remarkably uneven. While Cosmos, Lathe of Heaven, and Empire Strikes Back are excellent nominees, it’s difficult to see merit in either Flash Gordon or the Martian Chronicles.

Given the low quality of two of the finalists, it’s also difficult to explain the omission of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Ken Russel’s Altered States, or the third-season premiere of Blake’s 7.

One of our group called The Martian Chronicles
“the last gasp of the Disco era of science fiction.”
(Image via IMDB) 

The most egregious inclusion of the year is The Martian Chronicles. Airing over three nights on NBC, the TV adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story collection is a meandering hot mess that should have had no place on a Hugo shortlist. Over the course of six hours, director Michael Anderson weaves together elements from the Bradbury stories “Silent Towns,” “Rocket Summer,” “I'll Not Ask for Wine,” “The Settlers,” and “The Watchers” (among others). His apparent need to create a cohesion between the stories not envisioned by the author ends in narrative disarray. Separately, it would be easier to forgive the shaky special effects if it weren’t for the fact that on the other side of the Atlantic Blake’s 7 weren’t doing significantly more interesting model work with fewer resources. The Martian Chronicles scripting is leaden, the acting campy, the plot unengaging. Bradbury himself summed it up best, describing the series as “simply boring.”

A big-budget flop based on a 1930s comic serial, Flash Gordon is somehow even campier and more difficult to sit through than The Martian Chronicles … but it does at least have the benefit of weirdly beautiful production value and a ludicrously great soundtrack by rock legends Queen. Although supporting actors such as Brian Blessed and Timothy Dalton bring a lot to their roles, the nominal star Sam J. Jones is excruciating to watch as he lifelessly enunciates his lines as if sounding them out one-by-one off a teleprompter. It has to be noted that because Flash Gordon is relatively faithful to the source material, the movie is weighed down with painfully regressive attitudes towards gender and race. It has not aged well.

With a slightly campier script and a worse lead
actor, Flash Gordon compares poorly to the 
1974 movie Flesh Gordon.
(Image via IMDB)

The Lathe of Heaven is the hidden gem of this shortlist. It’s a remarkably faithful adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, made on a shoestring PBS budget by avant garde video artist Fred Barzyk. Given that Barzyk had previously directed the somewhat substandard 1973 Hugo Finalist Between Time and Timbuktu, some of our cinema club had gone into the movie with a bit of trepidation. Happily, many of us found it engaging and interesting, thanks to a script that retains much of the philosophical musings of Le Guin’s original, a strong cast, and thoughtful use of locations and other setting elements. The movie can be read as a rebuttal to utopian intellectuals proposing simplistic top-down solutions to all of mankind’s problems, ignoring the experiences of everyday people. It’s a genuinely clever little movie that holds up remarkably well — and probably would have ended up at the top of the ballot for at least one of our cinema club members.

Cosmos was a cultural juggernaut, the significance of which is difficult to appreciate today. Planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s 13-part documentary series tackles the vastness of the universe, mankind’s place in that cosmos, and speculates about what else might be out there. Built in part around Sagan’s own research into the possibility of extrasolar life, the documentary lays out an argument that we might not be alone in the universe. Because Sagan had evident love for science fiction and legitimized fandom’s embracement of these ideas, the documentary was beloved in science fiction circles. Sagan’s book of the same name, released in conjunction with the series, won him a well-deserved Hugo for best related work. But there are a few aspects of the show that have dated oddly; a lot of time is spent with Sagan looking off into space with a quasi-fanatical, beatific smile on his face, which is a bit off-putting. And while some current viewers might find the soundtrack by Vangelis to be oddly outdated and weirdly religious, others will enjoy the synthesizer-driven evangelism of it. At the time, there were complaints that documentaries shouldn’t be in the dramatic presentation category, but to our minds this is a creditable inclusion on the shortlist … and might have been a worthy winner.

The biggest controversy of the Hugo Awards that year, however, was the exclusion of Superman 2 from the shortlist. At the time, Hugo administrators lacked clarity on which year the movie would be eligible in, as it had a small number of showings in 1980, before a wider release in 1981. One of the greatest superhero movies ever made never appeared on a Hugo shortlist, and consequently the awards improved their rules on eligibility.

But even if Superman 2 had been on the ballot, we suspect that the Star Wars sequel would have bested it. Replete with iconic dialogue, memorably great locations, and some snappily edited action sequences, Empire Strikes Back is a movie that has stood the test of time and remains beloved by generations of Star Wars fans. On a purely technical level, The Empire Strikes Back was an impressive feat of cinema, featuring what could arguably be described as the greatest stop-motion sequences ever put to film. However, it does not have the streamlined narrative of the original movie and the plot suffers from a lack of focus. The story has no through-line, and as much as it’s a movie filled with truly great moments, some of us were left feeling that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Regardless of these slight quibbles, and regardless of what else might have appeared on the shortlist, it’s difficult to argue with The Empire Strikes Back as a winner. With the benefit of hindsight, fans were proven right and the mainstream critics were just … wrong.

The Vanished Birds soars

Rich with anthropological detail and criticism of market-driven ideologies, Simon Jimenez’ debut novel is a puzzle that rewards those with the patience to figure out how all the pieces fit together.

(image via Goodreads)

The novel’s sections appear at first to be distinct from each other. Readers begin by learning about a child growing up in an early agrarian society visited by space ships about every dozen years. Next they’re swept into the story of a merchant vessel from an advanced mercantile civilization reliant on exploiting planets like the one in the first chapter. Finally, the novel becomes an adventure about the rescue of a lost crew member.

Throughout the novel, flashbacks to a near contemporaneous earth are used to convey backstory through the eyes of Fumiko, an early architect of interstellar civilization who skips forward through time by going in and out of suspended animation.

Although various parts of the novel appealed to various book club members differently, there was a consensus that Jimenez’ writing is excellent. Some of us were drawn in by the first chapter while others were worried it was setting up a more wunderkind YA narrative. Using a subsistence farmer’s point of view in the first chapter served to create context for the subsequent stories.

There was even sharper disagreement about the flashbacks. Some club members felt it was essential exposition about the failure of modern capitalism and the colonization of space, while others described the flashbacks as extraneous.

The final section of the novel, in which the plot hits a fairly frenetic pace, left some readers scratching their heads. The change in tone from a contemplative — almost meditative — novel, to an action-adventure is somewhat jarring. 

(Image via Backpage)

Space opera is a subgenre that has all-too-often fallen into the trap of focusing on technology, rather than imagining alternative ways that humans can organize themselves. One of the most appealing aspects of The Vanished Birds is that Jimenez weaves social commentary and structural critiques into the cultural setting. He’s skillful enough not to slap readers in the face with this, but rather offers enough detail that those who scratch beneath the surface will be rewarded.

Jimenez seems deeply versed in the history of the genre; at times paying homage to Ursula K. le Guin, and at others referencing Alfred Bester. In fact, the book could be read as a direct response to Bester’s The Stars My Destination, as one of the main characters in The Vanished Birds can jaunt like the earlier novel’s protagonist Gully Foyle — and at a whim can travel across vast distances almost instantaneously. Jimenez’ seems to be suggesting that a citizen’s ability to leave would be the ultimate subversion of corporate power. 

The Vanished Birds is a puzzling novel, and one whose pieces occasionally fit together oddly. But it is also  a smart and thoughtful book that will deeply appeal to readers looking for cultural criticism in their outer-space adventures. 

Interview with Gautam Bhatia, author of The Wall

Lawyer, academic, and author Gautam Bhatia has been editing non-fiction articles at Strange

Gautam Bhatia’s debut novel
The Wall is the sort of book that
you keep pondering weeks after
you finish reading it. 
(Image via Amazon) 

Horizons magazine for more than five years. The Rhodes Scholar has written two non-fiction books about constitutional law, and in August saw his fiction debut The Wall released by HarperColins. The book, which is set in a city that has been trapped within an impenetrable wall for 2,000 years mixes insights into sociology, law, and the nature of rebellion. Bhatia, who is completing his PhD at Oxford, spoke via Skype with blog contributor Olav Rokne in September.   

The Wall is a powerful metaphor. Never more so than in the current political context, in which world leaders have used walls as a totemic symbol of their own xenophobia. Was this book in any way shaped by that political environment?

The idea of the wall was part of the story from the beginning. It was there when I started writing the book in 2008, long before walls … you know … really became such an unwanted part of our daily imagination. 

 But many people have always lived with walls.

I mean, the India-Bangladesh border has always inspired rhetoric about infiltration, so-called illegal migration, fences and walls. So there have been people who always suffered because of walls.

It strikes me that The Wall is actually an almost exact mirror image of what Iain M. Banks did; The Culture was entirely post-scarcity and the world of The Wall is one in which scarcity is turned up to the Nth degree.

There’s one little line where someone says that “you can vote for many things, but you can’t really vote against the wall.”

That line actually is a little sly tip of the hat to a statement made by one of the European Union commissioners when there was a popular protest movement in Italy against austerity, and he said that “look you can’t vote against the treaties.” There’s a sense that for the European Union, when a country wants to rebel against austerity, it’s treated as if they’re rebelling against the natural law of the world. How can you possibly vote against a natural law? 

 

And so I thought about what would happen if something like neoliberalism took a physical form in the shape of a wall; you literally can’t vote against The Wall.

In the world in which we live, scarcity is a rhetorical device that is used to suppress popular aspiration. What would happen if scarcity wasn’t just rhetorical, but actually physically there in front of you? 

Author Gautam Bhatia's
keen legal mind informs
his rich and nuanced 
worldbuilding. 
(Image via The Times of India)

What other writers influenced your writing?

[Ursula K.] Le Guin was a massive influence.

When I was seven or eight years old, my parents got for me a copy of the Wizard of Earthsea. There were three books I read when I was very young. One was the Hobbit, the second was the first Harry Potter (a Canadian colleague of my dad’s actually brought it from Canada when he came visiting and it hadn’t become a cult phenomenon yet), and the third was Earthsea.

At that time, I really loved Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter both. I kind of passed by them after a point, but Le Guin has been a continuing and formative influence.

Dispossessed, as you can see is a huge framing influence on this book in many ways, not just in the shape of the political conflict, but also what Le Guin kept telling us all: that we should imagine alternatives to capitalism, and that it was possible to imagine those alternatives even in constrained spaces.

There’s a scene early in your book that reminded me of The Dispossessed, how our words constrain our language, and how our languages can constrain our worlds. It’s the scene with Methila learning about the word “horizon.” I wondered if you were deliberately setting this up as a metaphor for the ways that our imagination can be constrained by a hegemonic set of ideas.

You’re right that it is a metaphor, but also I wanted to explore in literal terms what impact that kind of constrained life would have upon your language and what impact the inability to frame certain words would have upon how you could visualize certain things.

One thing that's fascinated me has been the interplay between language and the way we perceive the world. Samuel Delaney’s work was in that sense very interesting for me and more recently China Miéville’s Embassytown.

Can you tell me a little bit about the legal system, and what ideas were you trying to explore with it?

The exploration of the legal system in The Wall obviously stems from my other life as a lawyer — as a constitutional lawyer specifically.  

I realized over the years that legal structures — in a certain sense — form the hidden plumbing of the world. Many of the things that you don’t think have anything to do with the law are still very much undergirded by what the legal system allows or doesn’t allow.

[For example], the so-called free market itself is entirely a construction of a series of legal rules involving property contracts. So law is kind of the unarticulated basis of many things we do in our daily lives. It’s relatively unexplored in speculative fiction.

Law is so connected to the material realities of any society. If you were to change something as basic as having a wall that ensured a literal scarcity of resources, and created actual restraints on mobility, then the way the laws would be framed to express that material reality would also be very different. I thought it would be very interesting to explore.

Are you working on any books after these two?

Right now mentally and emotionally completely consumed by Book Two and finishing the story. I have some vague vague ideas for another series that continues to play with Ursula LeGuin’s whole idea that the task of speculative fiction writers is to imagine alternatives to capitalism. That’s just something that I’m obsessed with. I’m just thinking about how to work with that within a space opera framework.

It’s something a bit like what Iain M. Banks did, but he didn’t really explore how The Culture worked. He often focused more on the conflicts The Culture had with other non-Culture societies, and I’m more interested in how a post-capitalist space-faring society would work — how the mechanics of it might work from the inside. I just have some very very vague ideas which are completely unformed right now.

But for the moment, I’m investing my energy on Book Two and finishing that now.

Best Related Work: Category or Collection of Categories?

Best Related Works category has been a primary focus of controversy at this year's Hugo Awards. Specifically, the inclusion and scope of ownership on a collaborative project has motivated some heated rhetoric. This is a shame, because it has to some degree obscured visibility for a remarkably great group of nominees.

Transformative Works Shine

The phrase, “Hugo Award Shortlisted Author” carries meaning and integrity accrued over decades, due in large part to the tireless efforts of World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) volunteers and members of the fan community.

It should therefore be understandable that members of the WSFS community might get their hackles up at those who spuriously claim this honour, in this case authors who have submitted a story to the Hugo-shortlisted online repository of fanfiction, Archive Of Their Own (AO3) but have not built or maintained the platform itself.

To be clear, those who manage the official Hugo Awards web page have stated that the nomination was for the platform, rather than for any individual story. They have also made it clear that claims of “Hugo-nominated” status by AO3 authors is not appropriate. Yet several authors persist in these claims.

It has been suggested that these claims are made in jest – though this assertion seems disingenuous to

Some of the commentary about AO3's shortlisting
does not imply any respect for the Hugo Awards.

us. If these authors are making such claims in jest, it might imply that the Hugo Award is a joke to them.

Despite the inappropriate self-promotion of a small minority of AO3 contributors, the members of this blog are enthusiastic in our support for the site’s nomination.

Not only have the volunteers behind this site created tools for the sharing and organization of fan works, and not only has the user base of AO3 built a vibrant community, the organization has promoted user rights by advocating for fair use, an important legal provision within our increasingly heavy-handed and overreaching copyright regime.

The work of AO3 benefits the entire science fiction community and society as a whole. We are very glad to see it on the ballot. The fact that we won’t have AO3 at the top of our ballots speaks more to the overall strength of the shortlist and the chaotic nature of the Best Related Work category, than it does any controversy over the nomination.

Bringing Mexico To Worldcon

One of the members of our book club has an interest in Latin American and Indigenous cultures, and the Mexicanx Initiative was an important part of their first Worldcon experience. There is a good reason why this effort to bring wider awareness of Mexicanx science fiction has been successful: it was positive, collaborative, thoughtful, and inclusive.

Marcela Davison Avilés, Adrian Molina,
Ana Ramirez, and Julia Rios
at the Making of Coco panel.
(Photo by Kateryna Barnes) 

The project, which included items such as panel discussions, meetups, social media and an anthology, was based around bringing 42 Mexican and Mexican-American folks to the convention and creating a dedicated discussion of the culture within the convention.

What organizers John Picacio, Julia Rios, Libia Brenda, and Pablo Defendini accomplished through the Mexicanx Initiative had community-building implications for fandom, and could be a model for other equity-seeking efforts and groups. One hopes that the work that began in San Jose last summer will have long-term impact and implications.

Throwing Warner Brothers Into Mount Doom

Of all the shortlisted works, we were most dubious of The Hobbit Duology. At first blush, deconstructing mediocre movies seemed to us too slight a topic to merit three hours of YouTube

Lindsay Ellis' provides welcome insight
into the creation of The Hobbit trilogy.
(Image via YouTube)

analysis. These videos were, however, an incredibly pleasant surprise, and provided exactly the sort of meaty criticism that science fiction fandom needs.

Delving deeply into the production’s circuitous path, film critics Lindsay Ellis and Angelina Meehan trace the commercial forces, directorial decisions, pressures from fandom, and avoidable time constraints that led to the three Hobbit movies being such disappointments. Along the way, they consider Tolkein’s intentions for his most famous works and the questionable morals of the production companies who purchased the rights to tell his stories on the big screen. Using first hand accounts, they unpack the success of multinationals’ anti-actor lobbying efforts and the legacy it has left on New Zealand and its film industry.

Ellis and Meehan approach the subject as dedicated but critical fans, providing a nuanced, tempered analysis that highlights both the good in these films and their significant flaws.

We are very glad that this work received a nomination because we otherwise might not have watched it. At least one member of our book club is considering it for the top of their ballot.

Will LeGuin Three-Peat?

Having earned back-to-back awards in this category, it would be easy to think of Ursula LeGuin as the front-runner for the Best Related Work Hugo Award. That being said, this is an exceptionally strong year for related works, and LeGuin’s Reflections On Writing is fairly low on our ballots.

This year’s LeGuin shortlisted title is a collection of interviews conducted by David Naimon. At a scant 140 pages, this intellectual aperitif is the briefest work on the ballot.

As with everything LeGuin did, this is a thoughtful, nuanced piece. It examines three areas: poetry, fiction and nonfiction. The conversational tone is both a strength (in that it’s approachable) and a weakness (in that it occasionally meanders).

The Story Of The Hugos 

It seems odd to us that this is only the second time that Jo Walton has appeared on a Hugo Award

(Image via Amazon

ballot. It can be argued that several of her novels and non-fiction works warrant the recognition.

Her Informal History Of The Hugo Awards, based around the Tor.com blog posts of the same name that she wrote a couple of years ago, traces the history of the awards through their creation in 1953, through to the year 2000. True to its name, this is a subjective look at both the winners and the shortlists, livened with insight and personal anecdotes.

The book version adds significant material, additional essays and footnotes, as well as a curated set of comments from the blog. Walton has a deep and rich knowledge of science fiction and of fandom, and it shines through in essay after essay tackling controversies of years past, or years where she might disagree with the verdict of Hugo voters.

This is a work that we believe will have enduring value. In most years it would be a lock for the top of our Best Related Work ballots.

John W. Campbell: Good, Bad, and Ugly

Compulsively readable and deeply engaging, Alec Nevala-Lee’s group biography of major figures

Alec Nevala-Lee's book
Astounding explores the
lives of Golden Age SF
authors.
(nevalalee.wordpress.com)

from the Golden Age of science fiction is not just the best work in this category in 2019, but possibly the best work in any category this year.

Astounding delves into the lives of editor John W. Campbell and three of his protegees, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Hubbard. Nevala-Lee recognizes the success of these well-known creators, but also their flaws and failings and the resulting complications for the genre.

Having read the book a few months prior to it’s release, we’ve had time to mull over Nevala-Lee’s work, to ponder the themes of self-delusion, of ego, of wasted potential that his work lays bare. It’s the sort of book that stays with you, that informs your understanding of a genre, and that inspires discussion and analysis. We have been inspired to blog about it on multiple occasions.

Conclusion

This year, even more than most, Best Related Work has created difficult questions to adjudicate.

How do you compare the Mexicanx Initiative – a multimedia project with a time-limited scope – to Jo Walton’s collection of subjective essays about the history of the Hugo Awards? How do you compare Astounding – a richly detailed and engaging history of four of early science fiction’s central figures – to an online repository of fan fiction? These are fundamentally works for which success is measured on completely different axes.

It might be suggested that every single one of the shortlisted works deserve recognition for completely different reasons. It might even be suggested that in a rational world, they’d be recognized in completely separate categories.

Imagining the future of organized labour (part one of three)

List of unions.

This is the first of a three-part blog post about the historical invisibility of organized labour in science fiction. The second post, was published in mid-February explores recent works that address this notable absence. A third blog post examines labour unions in science fiction TV and movies. These articles could not have been completed without the help of science fiction historian Alec Nevala-Lee and labour researchers Mark McCutcheon and Bob Barnetson. 

Science fictional narratives are filled with depictions of employment.

Whether it’s Gaal Dornick taking a job with the mathematics department at the University of Trantor, or Robinette Broadhead leaving his job in the protein mines to pursue an opportunity with the Gateway corporation, the genre is rife with examples of standard capitalist employment relationships.

Often given less focus, however, are the rights of those workers, and the means by which those rights are asserted. When it comes to employment, the majority of science fiction offers either utopian visions in which everyone has a share in societal prosperity, or dystopian nightmares in which the elites have all the power and workers are crushed underfoot.

For example, neither Star Trek nor Babylon 5 ever explore the reason why productivity gains of new

The character Robocop crosses a picket
line to appease the corporate masters
of a privatized police department.
In the labour movement, he would be
called a 'scab.'
(Image via DenOfGeek.com)

technologies have not been concentrated into the wealth of an ultra-elite. Conversely, neither Altered Carbon nor Neuromancer offer explanations for why the working class has failed to organize solidarity-driven or democratic responses to societal problems.

Few of us have memories of the might of the North American union movement in the 1940s and 1950s. It was this movement that accorded workers stability and living wages that increased on par with productivity gains. It is probably this era of increasing income equality that made expansive utopian imaginings without explanation seem plausible.

In 1951, famed science fiction editor John W. Campbell wrote to H. Beam Piper, one of his regular writers, asking the author to tone down anti-union language in the story Day Of The Moron. He did so not because he supported the labour movement, but because he was afraid of offending members of the printers’ union that his magazine, Astounding, relied upon.

At their peak in 1954, unions represented almost a third of workers in the United States, and it was easy to take their existence — and their action as a counterbalance to the power of capital — for granted. Even employees in non-union workplaces enjoyed gains because employers had to keep up with union shops to retain and recruit labour.

But despite their prevalence in society, labour unions were largely absent from science fictional narratives during the Golden Age, and their few portrayals in the genre are usually either comedic or antagonistic.

As labour activist and science fiction author Eric Flint pointed out at WorldCon76, the major

At Worldcon 76 in San Jose, Eric Flint,
Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Cory
Doctorow discussed the dearth of
labour unions in science fiction.
(Photo by Kateryna Barnes)

contributors to the development of science fiction — from the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction through this era of union organizing and stability — were largely drawn from academic circles or the upper middle class. Despite working for a living, these authors and editors did not see themselves as part of the proletariat, and thus based their narratives on assumptions that their privileged working relationships allowed them to hold.

Arthur C. Clarke’s scientist and astronaut heroes exist in a rarefied academic bubble that’s divorced from more typical job markets. Even when tackling a worker’s revolution in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Heinlein defined the conflict in terms of nationalism rather than solidarity. Ray Bradbury seems to be largely unaware of conflicts about labour conditions. And the Amalgamated Union in Alfred Bester’s classic The Demolished Man is largely a force for ill due to corrupt leadership.

Of all the big-name authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, special notice should be given to Isaac Asimov’s troubled relationship to organized labour. Despite the fact that Asimov came from a working-class background, his portrayals of workers is often problematic and condescending - In Caves of Steel (1954), workers who are displaced by robots are shown to be semi-literate at best, using pidgin like “‘Maybe it’s time the gov’min’ reelized robots ain’t the only things on Earth.”

If his portrayal of individual labourers is dismissive, his depiction of organized labour is actively hostile: In Robbie (1940), the labour movement forms an unholy alliance with religious fanatics to oppose progress in the form of robots; in the Foundation saga, nepotistic labour guilds are in part responsible for the collapse of the Empire; and to make his antipathy more obvious, he wrote the story Strikebreaker (1957), in which the heroic lead character forces a worker to accept employer demands.

A hero to many left-wing science
fiction fans, Isaac Asimov had feet
of clay on some subjects, including
workers' rights.
(Image by Rowena Morrill) 

It is disappointing to note that Asimov, member of the Futurians and an author often perceived as a progressive voice, might have had such a significant blind spot.

Even one of the most labour relations aware works of that era, Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s comedic novel The Space Merchants, is far from a paragon. The novel introduces us to the United Slime-Mold Protein Workers of Panamerica, a union that both exploits its membership through unfair fees, and is unable to stand up against the corporation’s might.

The progressive New Wave of science fiction of the late 1960s may have addressed the genre’s blind spots around race and gender, but when the subjects of class and labour were examined, it was usually with a sense of despair. This viewpoint is understandable in the context of the times: after declining for most of the previous four decades, American inequality was on the rise; trust in liberal democratic political institutions was being undermined; and the worst aspects of hierarchical business unions were on full display through such figures as Jimmy Hoffa and Carlo Gambino.

Those few representations of labour-rights organizations are presented with either antipathy or comedic disdain. When Douglas Adams introduces the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Professional Thinking Persons in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the union’s representatives Vroomfondel and Majikthise are actively fighting against knowledge and research. Arnie Kott, the antagonist in Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, is a broad caricature of a union leader and is presented as bigoted, corrupt, egotistical, and thin-skinned.

One notable exception to this anti-union sentiment was found in Larry Niven's 1966 short story A Relic Of Empire, in which unions are described as a necessity

Depictions of workers rights and the struggle to defend those rights are few and far between by the

Has anyone from the Occupational
Health and Safety department
completed an ergonomic assessment
 of this power armor?
(Image via TheVerge) 

late 1970s and 1980s. Employees of the Weyland-Yutani corporation in Alien have little-to-no recourse when it comes to their right to refuse unsafe work. Neoliberal assumptions around employer-employee relations are reflected in more and more depictions of independent contractors in the genre. Johnny Mnemonic is a precarious worker, as are most denizens of the sprawl.

It could be argued that the cyberpunk subgenre is the apotheosis of despair over the state of workers’ rights. In The Diamond Age, the thete (lower-class) citizens have absolutely no rights, let alone employment rights, while workers like Molly in Neuromancer are even stripped of their right to remember the tasks they perform.

In these corporatist dystopias, workers are either unwilling or unable to organize in opposition to these measures, and what few escapes from serfdom exist are accomplished through heroic personal narratives. This view of the struggle for workers’ rights can be seen again in Neil Bloekamp’s 2013 box-office dud Elysium, in which a disenfranchised worker fights an unfair system, but does so on his own through violent action, rather than by organizing his workplace.

Interestingly, even in Ursula LeGuin’s exploration of anarcho-syndicalism The Dispossessed, workers rights are defended in neither the capitalist society of Anarres, nor on the anarchic world of Urras. On the latter world, the protagonist is forced into manual labour due to societal strictures, while on the former he’s part of a labour protest that’s violently put down. In neither world do we see an example of an effective labour movement.

As Mark A. McCutcheon and Bob Barnetson argue in their 2016 paper Resistance is Futile: On The

"THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE!
YOU WILL BE PRIVATIZED!
PRI-VA-TIZE! PRI-VA-TIZE!"
(Image via BBC.com)

Under-Representation of Unions in Science Fiction, “The paucity of realistic representations of unions in SF thus has political implications: it reinforces the absence of alternatives to ... neoliberal capitalism.” This observation is mirrored by Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan, “There Is No Alternative.”

The rigid adherence to one paradigm might be understandable in memetic (non-genre) fiction that strives to represent the world as it is, but in a genre like science fiction, which purports to be based on imagination, it is deeply disappointing. As Cory Doctorow noted this summer at a Worldcon76 panel on the working class in science fiction “There is no sentiment more antithetical to science fiction than ‘there is no alternative,’ … what we do as science fiction authors is exactly to imagine alternatives.”

Thankfully, a new generation was about to do exactly that.

Part two of this blog post, covering a renewed interest in organized labour in science fiction in the 1990s and 2000s, was posted on February 18, 2019.